My new workplace has set me thinking quite a bit about one's attitude towards work.
The baseline is always about "working smart and not just working hard." I guess being in Japan, the land of workaholics, everyone seems to be working hard. Long hours are common amongst my colleagues, and working late into the night (and sometimes, overnight) seems to be the badge of honour everyone is looking at getting. Yet it seems that a lot of time is spent on discussing without conclusion. With a culture used to avoiding conflict, I guess that can be expected. But this leads to a lot of time talking, and a lot more time trying to figure out what the conclusion is and how to move forward. More on that later.
I am used to working in a work environment which values professionalism, and knowing your area of work well (because people can get injured, if not killed, if otherwise), and having to pick up knowledge in double quick time. So I can't help but be a bit disturbed that my new colleagues, who have been on the job much longer than me, do not know their work as well as I thought they should. Not having written a program for more than 10 years, it was a steep learning curve having to pick up R and Python in weeks (actually, days). But now, I have reached a level where I can comfortably program in Python (I use R only rarely when I need to visualize data). And a level where I look at the code my colleagues came up with in the past, and seriously wonder what kind of thinking was behind the code (because of the inefficiency... I was taught that programs should not be just able to do the work, they should be written in an easy-to-understand manner yet perform efficiently.)
Okay, back to the working hard part. I do think my colleagues work too hard. They are so caught up in work, they don't have time to plan, and it seems that they are always trying to catch up. It becomes a vicious cycle since not enough planning means the work is not done as efficiently as it could be, leading to less time for the next job, which means no planning again and this just continues.
I shall always remember what one of my ex-bosses told me. One should always work at 80%. There is no such thing as working 120%. 100% is the max, and working at 100% is not sustainable. And working at 100% also means there is no spare capacity left to handle any contingencies/emergencies that may crop up. That 80% pace is a sustainable pace that allows one enough spare capacity to surge to 100% as and when needed.
Well, I guess my new job is a good place for me to learn about the working culture in Japan. It has helped me tremendously in improving my skills for searching up and learning new stuff, and as a revision for my programming skills. Let's see what other insights I can gain as I continue down this road.
The baseline is always about "working smart and not just working hard." I guess being in Japan, the land of workaholics, everyone seems to be working hard. Long hours are common amongst my colleagues, and working late into the night (and sometimes, overnight) seems to be the badge of honour everyone is looking at getting. Yet it seems that a lot of time is spent on discussing without conclusion. With a culture used to avoiding conflict, I guess that can be expected. But this leads to a lot of time talking, and a lot more time trying to figure out what the conclusion is and how to move forward. More on that later.
I am used to working in a work environment which values professionalism, and knowing your area of work well (because people can get injured, if not killed, if otherwise), and having to pick up knowledge in double quick time. So I can't help but be a bit disturbed that my new colleagues, who have been on the job much longer than me, do not know their work as well as I thought they should. Not having written a program for more than 10 years, it was a steep learning curve having to pick up R and Python in weeks (actually, days). But now, I have reached a level where I can comfortably program in Python (I use R only rarely when I need to visualize data). And a level where I look at the code my colleagues came up with in the past, and seriously wonder what kind of thinking was behind the code (because of the inefficiency... I was taught that programs should not be just able to do the work, they should be written in an easy-to-understand manner yet perform efficiently.)
Okay, back to the working hard part. I do think my colleagues work too hard. They are so caught up in work, they don't have time to plan, and it seems that they are always trying to catch up. It becomes a vicious cycle since not enough planning means the work is not done as efficiently as it could be, leading to less time for the next job, which means no planning again and this just continues.
I shall always remember what one of my ex-bosses told me. One should always work at 80%. There is no such thing as working 120%. 100% is the max, and working at 100% is not sustainable. And working at 100% also means there is no spare capacity left to handle any contingencies/emergencies that may crop up. That 80% pace is a sustainable pace that allows one enough spare capacity to surge to 100% as and when needed.
Well, I guess my new job is a good place for me to learn about the working culture in Japan. It has helped me tremendously in improving my skills for searching up and learning new stuff, and as a revision for my programming skills. Let's see what other insights I can gain as I continue down this road.
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